Without warning

The ice water he’d just swallowed was sitting very heavily in his stomach, as though he’d gulped down a gallon of the stuff instead of just a mouthful. That might have been anger – he was beginning to suspect this was some sort of prank. Tench was famous for them. When they were rooming together in college, he’d fabricated an entire gala ball at the Grand Hyatt, convincing a couple of college babes to hand out ‘free’, ‘strictly limited’ tickets on campuses all over town. They’d got as drunk as lords sitting in the foyer, dressed in rented tuxedos, watching hundreds of students waving their bogus ball tickets in the face of a bewildered hotel manager. Barney Tench was more than capable of fucking with someone’s head for a laugh. Especially Kipper’s.

‘Gone where, Barn?’ he growled. ‘You’re not making any sense.’

‘Just gone, Jimmy. Just fucking gone.’ His voice was scaling higher with every word he said. ‘Turn on your locator beacon. There’s a National Guard chopper headed your way soon. They’re gonna pick you up and transfer you to a plane somewhere. It’ll get you straight in here. Council’s called an emergency meeting. All heads of departments. Governor’s office is sending a team, although nobody can find Gary Locke. His schedule had him in transit today. In the air,’ he added, as though that explained everything.

‘Barney, is my family safe?’ asked Kipper.

‘They’re fine, buddy, they’re fine. Barb gave me your number. Look, I gotta go. The Guard can fill you in. I got a thousand calls to make now I found you. Just fire up that beacon, sit your ass down and wait.’

‘Bar-’

But the line cut out.

‘What the fuck was that about?’ he muttered. Shaking his head, Kipper knelt in front of his pack and popped the snap lock on the pocket containing his personal locator beacon, a small lightweight ACR Terrafix unit. He powered up the little yellow device and couldn’t help searching the skies, even though he knew his ride was probably still an hour away. Assuming it came at all, and Barney wasn’t now roaring with laughter, about to fall backwards off his chair. Who knew?

Sub-zero air torrents high above him stretched a few scraps of cloud into long white ribbons, streaming away towards the coast. He caught sight of a giant hawk as it dived into the valley, wings folded back.

‘Someone’s about to get eaten,’ he thought aloud.

Then he noticed the contrail, maybe twenty miles further north. The sky was crisscrossed with them during the colder months – great white arcs of vapour trailing the jet liners as they headed for Seattle, or the Pacific and the long haul to Japan or down to Honolulu. There seemed to be fewer than usual, just this one actually, and he had never seen a plane tracking so low over the Cascades before. His unease at the surprise call from Barney tightened into alarm as he watched the slow arc of the aircraft and realised it wasn’t going to clear the mountains towards which it was headed.

‘No,’ he whispered, aware that he almost never spoke aloud on his hiking trips, and that he was positively yapping his head off today. ‘No, don’t.’

His mouth was dry, and he drank from his canteen without thinking. The cold water hit his clenched stomach like acid, and for a second he thought he might vomit. That faraway plane, a thin tube of metal enfolding – what, a hundred, two hundred souls? – slowly, gracefully, inexorably speared itself into the side of a mountain, impacting just over the snow line, freeing great blossoming petals of dirty yellow flame to roll away into the morning air.

‘Ah shit…’

Kipper shook his head and took a few steps towards the small, roiling ball of fire, before he stopped himself. He would never make it, and anyway he had to stay here and wait for the chopper. He apparently had his own disaster to deal with.

Still, he had to do something. He keyed 911 into his sat phone, glancing down momentarily to check he’d got the numbers right. He could at least call this in. Maybe someone had survived – a ridiculous thought, which he recognised as such as soon as he’d had it. But he couldn’t just stand by with his thumb in his ass, taking in the view, could he?

‘Nine-One-One, which service do you require?’ The dispatcher sounded harried, and just as freaked out as Barney had been. But then, Kipper thought, that was probably her normal state of being.

‘This is James Kipper, chief engineer, Seattle City Council. I’ve just seen a passenger plane crash. A big jet.’

The dispatcher’s voice seemed almost mechanical, washed free of human affect by the multiple layers of impossibly complicated technology required to allow Kipper to speak to her from the side of this mountain in the middle of nowhere. ‘Sir, what is your location and the location of the incident?’

As Kipper told her that he was in central Washington state, in the lower reaches of the Cascades, and read his location off the GPS beacon, the soft rumble of the titanic explosion finally reached him.

‘Sir, please repeat. Are you outside the metro area?’